


Happiness at the End of the World

by Star_Going_Supernova



Category: Godzilla: King of The Monsters (2019)
Genre: :( sorry, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dadzilla, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Gen, Momthra, Orphan Maddie, Post-Godzilla: King of The Monsters (2019), Reclaimed by Nature, Sad, Successful Apocalypse AU, a soft one tho, he's trying but Maddie's got daddy issues this time around, quiet and empty cities steadily being taken over by nature is one of my favorite things, the Mothzilla is super low-key and mostly just because they're parents even more than usual here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:20:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24188056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_Going_Supernova/pseuds/Star_Going_Supernova
Summary: She sighed and picked at some long blades of grass. It’d been so long since she’d seen another living person instead of decaying corpses. That was rather the point of the apocalypse, though, wasn’t it?Monster Zero had been killed too late.
Relationships: Godzilla (Legendary | MonsterVerse) & Madison Russell, Godzilla/Mothra (Kaiju), Mothra & Madison Russell
Comments: 18
Kudos: 109





	Happiness at the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

> This one came out of nowhere. I was suddenly hankering for some aftermath of Emma’s plan actually sort of working, so here we are. 
> 
> Also, to be clear, this takes place a little more than a year after the events of KotM, altered as they have been. Hope you guys enjoy!

Maddie sat at the top of the grassy hill with her knees pulled up against her chest, staring out at what used to be a bustling major city. It was in ruins now, as most cities she’d seen in the past couple year or so were. They all looked the same, broken and crumbling and lonely. Abandoned and nameless. Empty.

The cities were dead, just like most, maybe even all, of their inhabitants.

There were a lot of things to consider about the end of the world. What happened to all the bodies hadn’t been something she’d ever thought about before. Now, it was impossible not to, just as it was impossible to walk among buildings without tripping over human remains.

But it wouldn’t be like that for much longer, Maddie knew. Not with how quickly trees and vines and moss and bushes were growing out of the wreckage. Just last week, she’d found a sapling taller than she was growing out of the middle of a dead man’s chest.

She sighed and picked at some long blades of grass. It’d been so long since she’d seen another living person instead of decaying corpses. That was rather the point of the apocalypse, though, wasn’t it?

Monster Zero had been killed too late.

Maddie would never know if this was the future of the world her mom had been envisioning. So few humans left, scattered without rhyme or reason. It didn’t feel like the restart attempt she’d been aiming for. At the very least, she would’ve been pleased to see the positive effect the Titans were having on the desolate earth.

It was nice, Maddie supposed, to see new life popping up and thriving in the barren cities. It would’ve been nicer if most of the human race hadn’t been sacrificed as casualties to reach this point. If. There were a lot of what-ifs Maddie had considered since Antarctica, since Isla de Mara, since the bunker.

What if Monster Zero hadn’t apparently gotten pissed at being manipulated by the ORCA? What if he hadn’t zapped the bunker containing her mom? What if he hadn’t dragged Rodan and half a dozen other Titans into annihilating Monarch, before unleashing them on the unprepared world? What if Godzilla had been able to kill him sooner?

What if she hadn’t, by pure luck, been outside of the bunker when it was essentially vaporized?

At least she knew the answer to that one: she’d be dead. Dead as her mom, her dad, and her brother.

At least none of the Titans had been actively aggressive after Monster Zero had been torn apart. They wandered aimlessly, mostly ignoring any humans they might come across. Assuming, that is, their habits hadn’t changed since TVs and radios stopped working. For all she knew, they’d started eating people or something. It wasn’t like she had a way to find out.

Maddie stood up and walked down the hill, restless from sitting for too long. She found flowers growing off a group of trees, so, with nothing else to do as she meandered around the silent landscape, she absently wove them together, picking them as she went. A flower crown slowly took shape in her hands.

She found a road, ripped up into uneven chunks by massive twisting roots growing beneath it. The buildings she saw farther down it were no better. Nature was reclaiming the earth, one tree at a time.

Yawning, Maddie gauged the sun’s position. It’d be dark soon, within an hour or two at most.

Knowing what that meant, she began retracing her steps back toward the hill. Before she even cleared the tree line, a bright trill split the almost-eerie silence. It wasn’t a summons, but a questioning sort of noise. Where are you, Maddie was being asked.

The way she’d gotten better at hearing the differences between vocalizations, a necessity when a Titan’s voice was the only one she heard anymore, made her feel… something. It used to freak her out a bit, when she first realized, enough for her to start talking to herself more. It was a stupid fear, that she would just up and forget English one day, but it wasn’t like she had parents anymore to point out how irrational she was being.

Now, after having months to get used to it, Maddie found it mostly bittersweet. It was nice not having to stumble confusedly through an attempt to understand, but she missed conversations. She missed talking to someone and having them talk back in recognizable words.

Maddie pushed past the last branches and emerged into the bare land at the foot of the hill. Flying close to the top of it was Mothra, just as expected. She spotted Maddie and swooped down, alighting gently with another trill.

She nodded down at the flower crown in Maddie’s hand, a quiet noise of curiosity accompanying the gesture. Maddie twisted the last stem into place and lifted the crown up to place it on her head. Mothra, obviously delighted, flicked her wings in a graceful rolling motion. She used them expressively, like how humans used their hands.

The Titan bowed her head with a playful chirp, and Maddie played along, bowing in return with a hand holding her crown in place.

“Is it time to go?” she asked once she’d straightened up. She wrinkled her nose at the answer, though she didn’t even consider protesting. Maddie easily climbed on Mothra’s back, having had lots of practice since the beginning of the end of the world.

Yes, Mothra had answered. Yes, the King calls for us.

Now, it wasn’t that Maddie disliked Godzilla. She thought he was pretty cool, and she was definitely thankful to him for killing Monster Zero. It’d been hard not to blame him for her parents’ deaths, but she’d seen the path her dad had taken by blaming him for Andrew’s. That sort of clinging grief and anger—it wasn’t something she wanted to live with for the rest of her life.

Monster Zero was entirely responsible for making her an orphan. Logically, she’d known that.

Emotions weren’t always logical though, and it’d taken time for her to forgive him of the fault she’d unfairly assigned him. But she had.

He confused her, though, and Maddie had never liked being confused.

She was just some kid, just a random human, one of the few who had managed to stay alive through the four-day apocalypse.

(It seemed ridiculous sometimes, that all it took was four days for the earth to go to hell. Four days, and a dozen Titans, and _boom_ —the survivors were left looking at a landscape better suited to only the most intense apocalypse movies. It felt like a bad dream at first. It should’ve been just a bad dream.)

What reason could a Titan—the _King_ of Titans—have for being all worried and protective and weirdly caring about Maddie? No matter how many times she asked herself, no matter how many times she tried to look at the question from a different perspective, she never felt any closer to an answer.

For some reason, it was easier to accept Mothra’s tendency to act sorta-kinda like a parent to her. Why Mothra had decided to not only watch out for her, but actively take care of her, was another unanswered question Maddie would take to her grave. That wasn’t to say she wasn’t grateful for it. Being left alone to deal with… _everything_ sounded awful. No, she was happy with Mothra’s presence in her life.

But Godzilla. Some part of her wanted to distance herself whenever he got all rumbly at her, some part was frustrated at not understanding _why_ he did, and some part—the part she just _knew_ came from little seven-year-old Maddie watching her dad walk away without looking back—trembled with something between fear and loneliness.

It made her feel out of place and wrong-footed around him.

Nonetheless, she didn’t complain as Mothra flew over the ravaged but regrowing land. Pressed up against the warm fluff of Mothra’s back, she barely noticed as night fell and the air grew cooler.

Much like how long car rides had always put her to sleep, Maddie soon found herself drifting off to the soothing sound of Mothra’s heartbeat beneath her head and the tickling rush of wind ruffling her hair.

• • • 

Maddie woke up still safely ensconced on Mothra’s back, though they weren’t flying anymore. The sun was already well on its way to lightening the sky as she rolled over and stretched. A wall of gray surrounded them.

The way Godzilla could contort his body would probably never fail to impress her, even when it made her feel phantom twinges in her own spine. He was on his stomach, mostly, with his head near Mothra’s face and his tail almost touching his own nose. She’d been a flexible little kid, but just looking at the way his body curved was like watching someone bend their fingers in all the wrong directions.

He didn’t give any sign of being awake, even when she sat up, and she’d never known Godzilla to fake being asleep. Mothra’s breathing remained steady and deep as Maddie inched toward the edge of her back until she could slide to the ground in a mostly controlled manner.

Okay, so she stumbled on the landing a little. But it didn’t count since no one was watching.

As carefully as one might navigate a hallway filled with motion-sensor lasers, Maddie found the narrowest part of Godzilla’s tail and stepped over it. Not a single twitch.

She dared to victoriously pump her fist in the air once before quickly moving away to explore.

They were at the edge of yet another ruined city, she quickly discovered, and the eerie silence briefly made her reconsider her plans to wander. But if this was where Godzilla was waiting for them last night, no way anything even remotely dangerous had dared to stick around.

It wasn’t like the silence was new, anyway.

Only a minute later, and Maddie knew something was different about this city than any others she’d seen. The foliage was more wide-spread, the trees larger, the concrete and cars and rubble almost completely reclaimed by nature. This wasn’t the beginning stages of regrowth.

This was years’ worth. 

“San Francisco,” Maddie whispered to herself in realization. Her shoulders sagged as she looked around. Her memories of this city, both good and bad, were so faded and unclear.

With slightly less enthusiasm, she continued onward. The deeper she went, the more forest-y it looked. Roots and vines thicker than she could get her arms around climbed buildings of metal and glass. Cement had been pushed aside to make way for trees, and in some places, she would’ve believed the trunks violently erupted out of the street, so broken was the concrete. Odd patches of grass and bushes littered the ground where just enough of a top layer of soil made it possible for life to persist.

A flower petal suddenly drifted down in front of her, and with a start, Maddie realized she was still wearing the flower crown. She reached up to pull it off, expecting all the flowers to be dead and wilted, but was met with resistance.

She walked over to a relatively intact reflective panel on a building to try and see where it was caught in her hair. High speeds of wind plus ever-longer hair made for a bird’s nest of tangles, so it was no surprise the stems had joined the mess.

Only, that wasn’t it. Maddie stared at her reflection and twisted this way and that, but the image in front of her didn’t change. Not only were the flowers still perfectly healthy, but they somehow looked fuller. And there were more of them, she realized. Buds she would swear hadn’t been there yesterday filled in the empty spaces and made the crown seem bigger and more impressive.

Her biggest shock was finding roots. They’d woven themselves through her hair, pale creamy-white in color, and completely lacking dirt. Maddie didn’t think she’d ever seen actual plant roots _not_ be covered in soil.

She stepped back from the building and looked around, as if expecting to find someone who could explain this to her, or perhaps jump out from behind an overturned car yelling, “Surprise!”. Predictably, no such person made themselves known.

Maddie looked around at all the wildlife growing in places no one would’ve expected it to be able to thrive in, and thought, _Oh._

Apparently, the Titans’ radiation was good for more than replenishing nature in cold, concrete cities. With a sigh, Maddie left her living flower crown alone for now, dreading the thought of going through her hair to pick out _so many roots_ , and decided it could be a problem for future-Maddie, as present-Maddie simply didn’t have the patience.

Determined to take her mind off it, she continued down the street, wandering without bothering to keep track of her path. Turning a corner a few blocks later, she came to an abrupt halt.

The edge of the worst piles of rubble began in front of her. The collapsed buildings formed miniature mountains of unstable concrete. Old news stories came to mind: people had been trapped under some of this stuff for hours and had to be pulled out by emergency responders.

It filled the spaces between crumbling, ivy-covered buildings like an ocean wave frozen in time. Moss covered a lot of it, she could see even from ground-level, and plenty of trees poked through gaps here and there.

It was different, seeing it in real life instead of on TV. The ruins dwarfed her in a way she thought she should’ve been used to, but she felt different here. The destruction felt different. Older, but more familiar. She used to know this city, used to live in it. Used to wander the streets just like she was now, though back then, she’d had adult supervision.

This was the first time she’d ever stood alone in San Francisco.

Taking a deep breath, Maddie began to climb. The debris barely shifted beneath her as she went, probably having settled over the years, with dirt and dust and roots filling in all the little spaces. And unlike other cities, she didn’t have to deal with human remains.

Maddie looked around as she reached the top. San Francisco had become such a strange mixture of man-made buildings and thriving nature. A concrete jungle, indeed. Being so much farther along in the process than the rest of the broken world, it was that much easier to see which would overcome the other, in the end. Not just imagine it, but _see_.

She crossed her arms over her stomach, hugging herself.

(It wasn’t like there was anyone left who could.)

This was the future, Maddie realized. Her future. She would watch the earth retake what had always belonged to it, and that would be that.

She wondered how many other humans were left, how many others would witness the slow but steady reclamation. She had watched the world be torn apart, the death toll climbing too fast to keep track of, and then communication had been lost.

There could be thousands of others, scattered across the globe, or there could be no one. Maddie could be the last, and she wouldn’t even know.

Desperate to keep from sinking into despair over the thought, she determinedly set off to find something to distract herself with. She found something attention-stealing easily.

A trio of trees had somehow managed to wind around each other and form a truly impressive knot of branches. Since one of the trunks actually sprouted out from an intact building, albeit with half its side missing, the whole thing looked even odder.

Maddie, once again, started to climb. It was sort of like if a maze and a jungle gym had a baby. The branches created twisting paths and inclines, and sometimes, she’d start down one only to find it had a dead end. She even had to cross over one bough like a balance beam, with nothing between her and a decent fall to the rather jagged rubble below.

It was some of the most fun she’d had in a while, climbing around that crazy triple-tree.

Even better was the little surprise she found tucked in a crook behind a mess of leaves: a bird’s nest, with a set of four pretty eggs in it. The mama bird chirped frantically at Maddie’s appearance, so she ducked away with a laugh before she could be attacked.

Her flower crown had not budged an inch despite all the twigs catching at her hair, but she had a hard time minding as she finally emerged on what she had started to think of as the end of her little maze.

The branch she stood on was the only jutting out like it was while still being thick enough to bear the weight of a young human girl. It faced the ocean, which seemed closer when there was nothing standing between her and it. The one or two lines of buildings that would’ve had long been scattered across the ground in tiny pieces.

She sat down at the apex, keeping one knee pulled up to rest her chin on while her other leg dangled freely. Maddie was quite high up, but she’d spent too much time flying with Mothra to be scared of heights.

Watching the far-off waves shimmer beneath the rising sun, Maddie began to talk to herself. It was harder in the beginning, more awkward, to speak without having a conversation partner. She’d gotten used to it.

She went back and forth between talking through the plots of books and movies she didn’t want to forget and talking about her memories as if she was telling them to someone else. Maybe she should try and find a notebook or something to write everything down in.

All these months, and she’d never really carried anything with her. Mothra was good about taking her places to find what she needed in the moment—food, a change of clothes, stuff like that. She hadn’t used a bed in ages though. Mothra never seemed to like leaving her alone for so long, especially at night.

Keeping things with her, like a notebook, wasn’t a bad idea. But it was another way to make the end of the world feel _real_ all over again, and Maddie avoided moments like that as much as possible.

She was in the middle of imagining what she would fill a hypothetical backpack with when the ground rumbled. Maddie sighed and briefly contemplated leaving her wonky tree before Godzilla could find her.

In the end, she stayed where she was, if only because she was comfy and enjoying her view, and didn’t particularly feel like running around to avoid someone who would find her anyway.

Godzilla emerged from behind a building off to her far left, which she was pretty sure was close to where she’d come from too. He shook himself in that almost dog-like way he had as he slowly stomped closer. The rubble shifted beneath his feet, though not enough to throw him off balance.

Maddie would have to be careful with her footing when she eventually climbed down, in case he destabilized the foundation.

She remained silent as he came to a stop beside her perch, and for a few minutes, they merely watched the ocean together.

“I was here, y’know,” Maddie eventually said, looking around at the buildings that still stood. She was almost frustrated to realize she didn’t recognize anything. “When those MUTOs attacked.”

She heard the surprise in his huff. When she peeked up at him, she found him staring down at her with something close to remorse. Would she have been able to recognize that sort of thing a year or two ago? Before the end of the world, before having no one other than Titans as company, would she have had any chance at understanding them?

“I don’t remember it that well,” she continued. “It was dark, and there were a lot of loud noises. Buildings falling. People screaming. There were fires, I think…” She trailed off, picturing what little she could of that night. “I saw you. Afterwards, when it was all over, and you were leaving. You walked right by me and my parents.”

She hadn’t understood, back then. Everything that happened—it was all a blur, especially now when the memory had faded. Took an eternity from start to finish, yet it felt like it had passed in the blink of an eye once it was over. She’d woken up the next morning, thinking it had all been a dream. Maddie remembered that much. Finding out that it had really happened had hurt in a way her heart still echoed, years later.

“My brother died that night,” she said, and Godzilla made a deeply wounded noise. Maddie tried not to think about it, but she couldn’t help but wonder if Andrew’s resting place was nearby. They’d never found his body, after all. “He got separated from us, I think. I remember my dad yelling for him. But… he was just gone.”

It’d been a long time since she’d allowed herself to bring Andrew up, even in the privacy of her own mind. Losing her parents had made the wound that much deeper. She wasn’t just an only child now, when she’d once been a sister, but an orphan as well.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked about Andrew with someone beyond a passing mention. It felt… maybe not _good_ to do it now, but better than it used to.

“I miss him. All of them,” she admitted before pressing her mouth against her knee to try and stop herself from saying anything else.

Godzilla shifted beside her, his vocalizations audibly distressed. She imagined he’d lean down to try and comfort her if his footing wasn’t so unstable on the rubble, or if she were a little higher off the ground.

Almost without her own permission, she kept talking. “It gets harder to remember him. My brother Andrew, I mean. But—I guess my dad, too. He wasn’t really around after San Francisco, and he… well, he died before I could really see him again in person.”

She _hated_ that her last memory of her dad was the blurry image from her mom’s computer when she’d been explaining her reasoning for ending the world. She _hated_ that she couldn’t remember the little details, like the exact color of his eyes, or how tall he was, or what his hugs had felt like. His voice didn’t even sound right in her dreams anymore, not when all she could hear was the distorted crackle of static woven into his words during that video call.

Maddie bit her lip and harshly pressed her palm against the rough tree bark until it stung.

He had come back for her. She had to remember that, but the years of distance weighed heavier on her heart than one, maybe two days' worth of him trying to be there for her. She huffed in a very Godzilla-like fashion and glared down at the ground.

Maybe she could find a baseball bat or a sledgehammer or something and beat up a car. There had to be an abandoned car around here with its windows still intact for her to shatter. Anything to make the tightness in her chest go away.

Sudden movement right in front of her pulled her out of her destructive contemplations and she looked up in surprise, somehow managing to stay steady on the branch. While she’d been distracted, Godzilla had managed to kneel down, sort of, so he was sitting on his legs—and part of his tail by the looks of it—in a pose that was very human.

It didn’t reduce his height by much, maybe by a little less than a third, but between that and Maddie being way up in a tree, he was able to reach out and brush his clawed fingers against her with a feather-light gentleness.

Maddie clenched her jaw against the abruptly strong urge to cry.

They returned to silence for a while, watching the shining ocean. At some point, Maddie whispered, “Thanks,” and almost hoped he didn’t hear it. His eyes flicked over to her for a moment before returning to the view, which really said a lot about how well he knew her—despite her occasional attempts at preventing just that.

After who-knew-how-long, a shrill screech broke the peace, and Maddie turned her head to watch Mothra swoop up and over the remaining skyscrapers in their direction. She wondered what Mothra thought of San Francisco. Was it just another ruined city to her, like most others destroyed during Monster Zero’s brief reign?

Did she know what happened here, all those years ago?

Mothra alighted gracefully on top of the building Maddie’s tree was partially connected to. She looked down at Maddie and chirped a happy greeting, bowing her head as she did.

Remembering yesterday, Maddie bowed her own head, unable to lean into it from her perch in the tree. “It’s stuck,” she called once she’d straightened. “The roots grew overnight and now it won’t come off.” She reached up and tugged to demonstrate. The flower crown held fast.

Tilting her head, Mothra stared for a long moment before trilling with laughter. It wasn’t mocking, though, or even teasing. She was delighted.

“Yeah, yeah, bet you wouldn’t like it if it was stuck on you,” Maddie muttered without any real heat.

Godzilla rumbled, laughing himself, and when Maddie turned to give him her best evil eye, he merely mimicked Mothra and bowed his head.

Heaving a sigh, because she wasn’t rude, she returned the gesture. The satisfied purring noise he made, which was even deeper than his normal rumbles, managed to bring a smile to her face.

“I don’t know how you guys aren’t sprouting moss all over yourselves, if just being near you was enough to cause this.” She rubbed a velvety soft petal between her fingers. “And Methuselah doesn’t count.”

With an amused snort, Godzilla offered his palm to Maddie, gesturing up at Mothra as he did. After giving the tree a pat goodbye, she slipped off her branch and stayed seated as he stood.

He held his hand beside the roof, perfectly steady, but Maddie hesitated. She tilted her head back to look up at Godzilla, who patiently gazed back down at her. Finally, she offered him a shrug and muttered, “I don’t mind staying with you. If you want.”

Mothra immediately flapped her wings and took off to glide around them, leaving the both of them with little choice—and, y’know, Maddie knew her weirdness with him hadn’t exactly been subtle, but this was uncalled for.

She crossed her arms and refused to look at either Titan while Godzilla straightened up and held his hand closer to his body. He, at least, seemed to be trying to contain his pleased rumbles.

“Shut up,” she grumbled as he started walking. A little smile played over her face anyway.

Maddie didn’t know where they were headed—rarely did, actually—but that was okay. She wasn’t alone, and that was what mattered to her most these days. The future sometimes felt daunting, being a kid in a post-apocalyptic world, but she refused to obsess over it. There was only madness in that.

She took things one day at a time. There was a pair of Titans who made sure she had food to eat and time to sleep. They kept her ghosts from haunting her. Maddie didn’t know how they could possibly benefit from having her around, and maybe someday she would understand them enough to ask. For now, she simply took comfort and found happiness in their presence. The end of the world wasn’t at all like she had ever imagined it, but that was okay—

—it was a hell of a lot better.

**Author's Note:**

> I love being able to write all my own personal favorite self-indulgences. 
> 
> • [my tumblr](https://star-going-supernova.tumblr.com) •


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